What's worse is this: real things that you may have encountered in your daily life often break. When they do, they either function at a reduced capacity or not at all. This can happen on TV, but it is at least as likely that, rather than simply not working, they will do something else entirely, perhaps even something more spectacular than the thing they do if you Reverse Polarity.

The thinking is this: the transporter does something really amazing and miraculous when it's working. Just imagine how amazing and miraculous a thing it could do if it were broken. Never mind that this is no more logical a line of thought than, say, "A functioning toaster makes toast, but a broken one might start suddenly making ''French'' toast! Or maybe even sausage links!!"

Examples:

open/close all folders

Anime & Manga

The "malfunctioning toaster would make sausage rule" also applies to magic as well as science. In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, when Saiou's defeat-equals-mind-control spell fails on Judai, instead of just not being Brainwashed, Judai loses the ability to see monster spirits and the images on Duel Monsters cards.

Kurau in Kurau Phantom Memory suffers from bouts of weakness since the arrival of her "pair", Christmas—usually when being chased or having to fight. Of course, when Christmas is around it only adds to her strength.

Happens to the Millennium Falcon The Empire Strikes Back, when the Imperial attack forces Han and Chewie to rush a maintenance job. When the hyperdrive works, it lets them travel faster than light. When it doesn't work, it... doesn't do anything. (Funny, that.)

In Animorphs, it happened a couple of times with Body Horror-riffic results. Rachel suffered a case of Involuntary Shapeshifting, turning into crocodiles, ants, and elephants at inconvenient times. Marco got it even worse, turning into a series of Two Beings, One Body creatures. (Dude. Osprey-Lobster. Trout-Gorilla. Neither of which could breathe. And, of course, the mighty poo-bear! [Poodle-Polar Bear.])

In the backstory of the Foreigner series, the starship Phoenix fails to drop out of hyperspace when it should. When the pilot presses the "emergency stop" button they find that they haven't merely overshot their target, they haven't merely gotten turned in the wrong direction, but they have no idea where they are. With the amount of fuel they had it shouldn't have been possible to go further than 30 light years from Earth, in which case they should easily be able to spot the Sun, but no known stars or pulsars are visible to their telescopes, so it seems they accidentally took a trip through a shortcut in hyperspace which hyper-physics says shouldn't exist.

Awake In The Night Land has the Earth Current, which can protect the humans from the Eldritch Abominations of the titular Night Land. However the exact date in which it will fail has been calculated for eons, which will eventually culminate in the extinction of mankind.

Live Action TV

The transporter in Star Trek would break (in the simple "fails to work" sense) pretty much any time our heroes needed to make a hasty exit from a hostile planet. It would break (in the spectacular sense) on occasion as well. Broken transporters have created twins of at least two people (Kirk and Riker), in one case somehow separating "good" and "evil", caused people to regress in age, merged two individuals to create a viable and integrated third individual, sent people to a parallel universe, and even transformed a bunch of people into manatees trapped in the void between dimensions.

Star Trek's holodeck is also a prime example. So much so that Holodeck Malfunction is a trope in its own right. The most common "simple" breakdown is to lock the senior officers inside and turn off the safety protocols. Why these features would always be the first to break defies explanation. However, the holodeck can give 'interesting' result without even been broken, say, by giving a simulation of Professor Moriarty full sentience and complete control of the ship's computer.

And the holodecks. And Data. Both of them should have tossed off of the 1701D at their first sign of major trouble... which happened for both of them in TNG's first season.

In a more down-played fashion, the communicators more than once had to be kept from working properly for the reasons mentioned in the Cell Phones Are Useless tropenote That trope specifically points to this one for futuristic communications not working.

Borg technology is popular Applied Phlebotinum on ths show, being depicted as able to grow in an organic manner, absorb nearby technology and resist attempts to deactivate or remove it. But the most important of Seven of Nine's implants breaks down, is perhaps the only one that is not self-repairing and ones from deceased drones likewise become useless very quickly and thus cannot be salvaged. Pity Starfleet did not know this, because a weapon specifically designed to target that one implant could kill drones easily.

Stargate SG-1 frequently has DHDs broken or destroyed on planets where the team would not like to stay. More extravagantly, a malfunctioning Stargate trapped one of the team in a wormhole (when one Stargate was destroyed), trapped Earth in a time-loop (when working in conjunction with an alien device that was intended to do this), nearly destroyed a star (though technically the gate was not malfunctioning, just being abused), actually destroyed a star (this time on purpose), sent SG-1 backward in time, and almost sucked Earth into a black hole. The worst the gate has yet done on Stargate Atlantis was to ensnare a puddlejumper when one of its engine pods failed to retract.

Not mention the teleportation chips SG-1 had installed recently for purposes of whenever deus ex machina is needed. Take a wild guess what happens when the episode is 30 minutes in and one is not needed.

In Stargate Atlantis the Stargate managed to send Colonel John Sheppard 48000 years in the future by the same problem that sent SG-1 to the past, considerably increasing the bar for Atlantis' Stargate mishaps. To make matters worse it wasn't a proper breakdown, just poor programming.

Also, in one try at making a power source more powerful than the Zero Point Module (a device that draws energy from an artificially created micro-universe) in Stargate Atlantis they ended up almost destroying a parallel universe (although they knew something as such would happen, they only didn't knew the other universe would be populated, much less that it would be a parallel one). The incredible part is that the machine became an actual extra-dimensional portal.

This is actually at least partly justified. The main Stargate lacked its standard control system, a DHD, and instead had a jury-rigged human-made one using supercomputers. This meant they could easily bypass safety systems, but it was also more prone to malfunctioning in plot-moving-along ways, such as in "Red Sky" where the wormhole pierces through a sun and damages it.

A particularly bad offender was Seven Days, where the sphere seemed to malfunction more often than it functioned, and could do anything from inverting the morality of the entire universe to turning its pilot into (I swear ) the pope.

Doctor Who's TARDIS is a particularly unreliable bit of Phlebotinum. Its navigation is notoriously unreliable when it works at all, its camouflage system has been stuck for the past 40 years, it has a habit of ignoring the Doctor's directions to deposit him in situations of extreme and immediate peril, and it was once blown to bits outright. Also, it once shrank its passengers to the size of fleas. In contrast to the examples above, though, rather than breaking at the worst possible moment, the TARDIS seems to work correctly only when it's absolutely vital that it does (see Million-to-One Chance, One Buwwet Weft). That said, the TARDIS is supposed to be piloted with six crewmembers, not just the Doctor plus one.

It's heavily implied that when the TARDIS lands in the wrong time zone/place at the start of an episode, it's because the Doctor just doesn't care that much. It's shown that the TARDIS making that noise is the Doctor intentionally flying it badly. This explains why it goes where it needs to at critical moments. The rest of the time he's effectively showing off to the companion, like your mate who drives with two fingers on the wheel and never uses the footbrake.

And he flies it with the 'parking brake' on.

Apparently so does every other Time Lord we've ever seen, since all TARDISes have been shown to make the same sound.

The episode "The Doctor's Wife" revealed that the TARDIS is sentient and in love with the Doctor, and it often sends the Doctor where she thinks he needs to be, sometimes malfunctioning to keep him there.

The Doctor also has a piece of "Psychic Paper" that appears to the people he shows it to as whatever credentials the Doctor needs to pass as whatever he's trying to pass himself as. One time, he tried to use it to convince a kid that he is recognized as a responsible adult

In Voyagers!, the boy visits the time of Thomas Edison and finds to his horror that the curious inventor has disassembled his time machine, the handheld device called the Omni. The inventor insists he is confident he can reassemble it, and by the end of the story, he proves it, as he presents the boy with a fully intact Omni; the operation even repairs an intermittent malfunction in the device.

Also, the Omni malfunctioning is what starts off the series; it's not programmed to take Bogg past 1970, but a brief malfunction lands him in 1982, where he picks up Jeffrey...who he then can't take home again.

Pick ANY show which features ships with some FTL drive. Then get the ship in some deep shit where jumping out (then optionally coming back with reinforcements) would be the best option. If the ship has been hit, it won't work. Sometimes justified with some Technobabble about the structural integrity and the massive forces of hyperspace. Sometimes not. Notable occurrences:

The only time the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive malfunctioned (not due to battle damage) was when it was purposefully disabled by Imperial forces. Even then, one astrodroid was able to bring it back online in moments.

The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica has this happen once, despite jump drives being very reliable at any other time. The ship wasn't even under attack or anything. It's just that a Cylon Basestar they managed to commandeer was also trying to jump back to the Fleet at that time. The Basestar made it, but the ship the Colonials were on accidentally jumped back to the same coordinates they were jumping from. Cue a Basestar suddenly jumping in right on top of the Fleet...

In the Wizards of Waverly Place episode "Fashion Week", the magic power plant went offline, and the wizard spent almost an entire episode without magic.

Sliders runs on this premise. In the pilot, the timer (a divice that opens a wormhole to another dimension) is accidentally reset and, instead of taking the protagonists home, they get stuck jumping to random parallel worlds every episode with little hope of returning. Oh, and the timer manages to break a few times too, such as when a whole "bubble" universe is formed based on two of the characters, or when a lightning strike at the wormhole causes Quinn to become a ghost.

Tabletop Games

Warhammer 40,000 likes this one, usually with things (or people) breaking or being corrupted by Chaos at just the right time to sentence lots of people to horrific death.

Paranoia likes this one, usually with things (or people) breaking or being sabotaged by Commie Mutant Traitors at just the right time to sentence lots of citizens to highly amusing death.

BattleTech thrives on phlebotinum unreliability. The Faster-Than-Light Travel-capable JumpShips are using 300+ year old KF-drives that nobody knows how to build; the fear of being stranded in an uninhabited system from a KF-drive malfunction ensures that exploration is slow and makes the Successor States more willing to annex each other's systems than to set up new colonies. In the BattleTech Expanded Universe's enormous Twilight Of the Clans series, finding the Clan Smoke Jaguar homeworld before their starships break down becomes a major plot point.

Video Games

In Fallout the water chip of your home vault breaks (replacements were shipped to another vault, of course which never needed one, because Vault 13 was only sealed long enough for it to break down as a social experiment in long-term isolation), starting your quest for a new one. Although Fallout 2 reveals the cause of the water chip failure: It was your own grandchild (the sequels hero), who travelled back in time, fiddling with the controls of vault 13s main computer, thus breaking the ''water chip''.

At one point in No More Heroes, an enemy sets off the sprinklers when he sees Travis coming. The water shorts out his beam katana's battery, and a segment follows where Travis, being electrocuted, must run a gauntlet of enemies to reach the room with the sprinkler controls. Even after the sprinklers are turned off, you have to recharge the katana, though the game does give you a Full Battery power-up.

In the PC game Star Wars: Empire at War - Forces of Corruption, during the last mission, Tyber Zann captures the Eclipse-class Star Destroyer. The game then allows you to use its superlaser, capable of smashing a capital ship instantly. Predictably, it breaks down just as a Super Star Destroyer enters the area.

Even worse, since you're expected to defeat both the Imperial and Rebel forces at the same time.

The superlaser does come back online but only after the Super Star Destroyer is blown up, leavjng only a few cruisers and frigates to finish off. And then, Zann goes ahead and blows up the Eclipse instead of keeping it.

Ret Conned in the books, where Zann abandons the Eclipse instead of scuttling it.

Unreal was a bit inconsistent with this, human tech either worked far better than it should or very badly. In one case a futuristic communicator didn't work on a ship about hundred metres away, sensors are mentioned as being infective but other cases have weapons working underwater and signals getting off planet. The invading aliens however, have no problems getting their stuff to work.

At the end of Descent 2, the Pyro GX's warp core malfunctions and dumps him in the wrong place. This is revealed in Descent 3 to have been deliberate sabotage.

At the end of Halo 3, the firing of the replacement Halo causes the slipspace gate to collapse prematurely, dropping MC and Cortana near a Forerunner planet in an unknown location.

In Mega Man Battle Network 3, Flashman's last gasp before deletion glitches up Lan's PET, at one point making it impossible for Megaman to jack out.

Fenix in Starcraft I is ambushed by hydralisks in a cutscene. Unfortunately for him his psi-blade emitters picked that moment to malfunction. Incredibly enough he still managed to survive whatever the hydralisks did to him, though the damage was severe enough that he had to be placed inside a Dragoon.

Parodied on Bob and George, specifically the Star Trek "holodeck malfunction". After the training simulator breaks and traps someone inside a deadly simulation, they ask if this happens often. They learn that this has happened every single time they use it. And they keep doing it anyway.

In D&DS9, after an attack by the Borg (and a Critical Hit roll) the U.S.S. Saratoga suffers a Warp Core Breach. This happens less than one minute into the campaign.

Western Animation

Futurama spoofed this by having a holodeck malfunction bring the greatest villains of history to life: Attila the Hun, Professor Moriarty, Mr. Hyde, and "Evil Lincoln". In an homage to Star Trek, Moriarty declares, "Righto gents, it's another simulation gone mad, murder and mayhem, standard procedure."

In another episode, a typical microwave turns into a time machine when Fry puts a metal container into it just as a solar flare hits the ship.

Parodied in a "Treehouse of Horrors" episode of The Simpsons, where Homer's toaster turned into a time machine when he attempted to repair it after smashing it trying to get his hand out of the thing.

Ben 10 has this at least once every episode. Handy viewer shorthand: When the Omnitrix is red, Ben can't transform because it needs to recharge. Also, there was one of the "toaster makes sausage" variety, where prying off the faceplate of the Omnitrix with a screwdriver and trying to stick it back on with bubble gum results in that episode's transformations becoming Mix-and-Match Critters.

Codename: Kids Next Door: The origin story behind the Delightful Children From Down the Lane goes that Father's first Delightfulization Chamber malfunctioned and overloaded when he put the five of them inside, turning them into a kid-hating zombie hive-mind rather than "the perfect children."

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy